Don MacDonald

  • The Ghibli Store in Tokyo Station…not pictured: the madness of “Character Street” full of all kinds of stores like this, packed with shoppers and mascot/anime merchandise

  • In Japan, the MINI Countryman is called the Crossover, apparently:

  • Daibutsu of Kamakura

  • Merry Christmas from Ginza!

  • Inspired by @vasta and @herself my “currently reading” bedside pile. Being on a social media sabbatical since November has really helped here, and this pile is pretty manageable at this point.

  • Hat tip to @jeremycherfas for this RSS feed for Nancy. Great to be able to read it without having to trudge through a UI intensive web site!

  • This concept of an iPhone Mini is basically my ideal phone. I wish they’d make something like this, but sadly Apple keeps going the direction of thumb-cracking behemoths…

  • If you are interested in sweet, sweet schadenfreude, you will enjoy this article in which a Yankee fan grapples with the first stage of grief, denial, and tries to convince themselves that in fact championships are actually not good and winning percentage is better anyway.

  • iPad watercolor attempt, using app Procreate (yes that is really the name) it seems to be the best app for drawing on the iPad, at least that I’ve tried. This watercolor effect is not bad, but I’ve been unable to find one that really captures watercolor’s transparency…

  • I’m thinking to set up webmentions on my site (wordpress). Does anyone have know of some good documentation for doing so? cc @kicks @bradenslen

  • So I see there is a major WP upgrade waiting in my dashboard. Are the big changes all to the text editor, or will it mess up all my precious hand drawn page elements? I am honestly most concerned about my precious hand drawn borders, tbh

  • Let’s not Talk about Content or its Consumption. To aggregate specific art forms under the term “content” assumes that art is fungible, that words and images can, like water, be poured from one container to the next without any fundamental alteration of their nature.

  • Olivia Jaimes, the mysterious cartoonist behind ‘Nancy,’ gives a rare interview

  • Meeting doodle

  • In the late nineties and early aughts, Takeshi Kitano went on an absolute tear, directing and acting in a string of amazing movies in his own highly idiosyncratic style. Zatoichi is his take on the blind swordsman and it doesn’t disappoint. (iPad art by me)

  • Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi

    Thanksgiving movie night: Takeshi Kitano’s magnificent Zatoichi. In the late nineties and early aughts, Takeshi went on an absolute tear, directing and acting in a string of amazing movies in his own highly idiosyncratic style. Zatoichi is his take on the blind swordsman and it doesn’t disappoint. ⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

  • One of my favorite all time package designs

  • Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends in the US!

  • Winter has arrived in Boston. Not shown, (out of frame, behind buildings): cavern of champions

  • While I am on the subject, Splashdown’s Stars and Garters is another great 90’s Boston Indy album. Top 10 for the decade, available more conventionally on AppleMusic.

  • Check it out…Boston alternative rock band Tribe’s entire discography available as free download here. Abort is really, really great and one of my favorite albums of the 90’s. Almost every track is excellent, Abort, Here at the Home, Joyride, and Jakpot are exceptional

  • And that auld triangle went jingle jangle…

  • I wonder if the iPad’s adoption of USB-C (along with presumably next years phones) will be the tipping point that USB-C has been waiting for. Will it become as ubiquitous as USB-A?

  • The Front-End Loader of the Mind

    Text is our most versatile and efficient means of communication. It seems to me that dedicated keyboards will be, for some time to come, the best means of entering text into a computing environment.

    I think at one time, Apple truly thought that touchscreens were the future of computing, in the sense that iPads and Surfaces would supplant Macs and PCs. That seems pretty clearly not to be the case, although it was conventional wisdom in technology circles a few years back. I think it also explains why the Mac stagnated between 2014-2017. I have a feeling Apple was sunsetting the Mac, much as they had the iPod a few years earlier. Yet, things didn’t turn out quite as expected. iPad Pro or Surface will indeed be able to perform 90% of computing tasks just fine. There are an awful lot of tasks (e-mail, video, browsing, social media) for which a software keyboard and imprecise selection are completely adequate. The issue is that the additional 10% tend to be professional use cases.

    The mistake was in thinking that the future of computing lay with one device. Just as there are uses for cars and trucks and even specialized machines like backhoe loaders in the automotive space, so there are in information technology. Sure, you can add a monitor mount and a hardware keyboard to your iPad, but it’s a bit like mounting an aftermarket backhoe and front-end loader to your pickup truck. Yes, it will work, but if you’re going to be moving a lot of dirt around, you’re probably best off giving Caterpillar a call.

  • “No way a New Yorker would ever become mayor of Boston, unless he or she publicly renounced the Yankees and forced Dunkin’ Donuts to give out free crullers in perpetuity.” I would 100% vote for a mayor who ran on this platform. I would phone bank for them.

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